[ale] recovering an ext3 drive

[Joe]

Geoffrey <esoteric at 3times25.net> writes:

I had this exact same argument with Drew some time ago. I later
decided he was basically right, but at the time I didn't want to admit
that :-) It's a cultural issue, not a technical one.

> ChangingLINKS.com wrote:

[snip]

> > You imply that making a mistake is "stupidity" and that there is
> > some great benefit for people suffering or being punished for
> > accidents? Where does that come from? (I hear some doctor in the
> > background claiming your parents did this to you).
> 
> There is a gain in experiences such as this.  We all learn from our
> mistakes, or should.
> 
> > Darwin's rules should be given a bigger priority than they currently
> > do. Why?
> 
> Reference above.

(Aside: this is a terrible argument. Darwin's rules are *always* in
force *everywhere*.  We get to alter our environment in order to
change the survival distribution, but Darwin is still running the
show. If you supply tools that permit more organisms to survive, you
might find some hidden fitness maxima that would not be apparent
otherwise.  Right, this analogy has been stretched some distance past
its breaking point now...)

> > We don't need to be protected from ourselves. Why not?
> 
> I'm the kind of person that thinks it's quite stupid to sit at a red
> traffic light when there are no cars in sight on the road with the
> green light.  I'm intelligent enough to make a proper decision and
> cross the road safely.  Still, if I do, and there's a policeman behind
> me, I'll get a ticket.

I'm not quite sure what the point of that is. You're certainly free to
break the law if you want to, but we (the society, or the OS, I guess)
are then free to punish you. The question is, are the rules you have
to play by easy to get along with, or not? The set of rules Windows
imposes on the user are, for many users, easier to understand and
follow than those imposed by Linux. Yes, that's MicroShaft's fault, in
many ways (although Apple surely bears a significant portion of the
blame). But those rules are not wrong, they're just different.

Also, everyone *knows* the rules of the road. Everyone has to pass a
driving test before they get into a car by themselves.  No one has to
pass a test on using "rm" before they shoot themselves with it.

Really, distros ought to have a "newbie mode" that does something
like this (ideally with a per-user binary dir, not /bin):

$ mv /bin/rm /bin/really_rm
$ mkdir /tmp/Recycler

/bin/rm:
#!/bin/sh
mv $* /tmp/Recycler

/bin/cleanup:
#!/bin/sh
/bin/really_rm -rf /tmp/Recycler/*

/bin/undelete:
#!/bin/sh
mv /tmp/Recycler/$1 .

And run /bin/cleanup on every boot. That way, new users will be
protected from the most common "rm IMPORTANT.txt" - oh shit!  kind of
trouble. They can also clean the recycle bin manually.  They just need
to be aware that a reboot will really kill everything they've deleted
since the last cleanup.  Granted, this scheme isn't foolproof, nor is
it completely analogous to the Windows recycle bin, but it would be a
help to newbies.

To do it right (that is, make it work across all applications,
automatically recover recycle-bin space, etc.) would require
changes to glibc.

> > We sure don't need to be protected from our own stupidity.
> > Why not?
> 
> If we never make mistakes, we'll never learn from them.  Just like the
> traffic signal example, there are things I'm capable of doing on my
> own. I don't need help.  Another stupid traffic light example.  You're
> sitting in the left turn lane with a red light.  The traffic going
> straight in your direction has a green light.  There are no vehicles
> in sight in the on coming lanes, yet, I must sit at the light until it
> turns green.  How stupid is that?  What a waste of my time.

Naivete is not the same thing as stupidity. A system that wants to be
used needs to be useable by its users. If the goal is for Linux to
become a mass-market desktop OS, then "You're stupid" is emphatically
not going to work as a customer-support strategy.

> > What is benefit of "delete" over "hide"?
> 
> You don't waste the resources.  Besides, if you want to hide a file,
> move it to a directory you don't look at.  Remove means remove.
> Delete means delete.  Archive means archive.  If you want access to
> the file at a later date, choose archive.

You are absolutely correct, but users don't necessarily know it.

Ideally, this would never be an issue - we'd just have infinite
storage. Give it a few years, I guess :-)

MicroShaft has captured the desktop largely because it permits naive
users to get work done (or appears to, anyway). Leaving aside all of
the illegal tactics M$ has used to get its products on every desktop
in the world, Windows has a much better *appearance* of
user-friendliness than does Linux. Linux, however, is a far superior
technical base upon which all of the vaunted "user-friendliness" of
MShaft products could be built. So why not do that, and rope in all
those naive users? (See OS X for inspiration, perhaps.)

Cheers,

-- Joe
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